Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Use Evernote in your Content Marketing

To plan, implement, and execute a content marketing strategy for your startup or business can be a daunting task; rest assured, however, you have already taken a giant leap forward by recognizing the importance of a content marketing strategy to your company's growth. Once you have recognized the importance of content marketing for today's marketing professional, you can use guides like ours to teach you how to create a content marketing strategy and implement a content calendar for your marketing department. One important part of any content marketing strategy is keeping up with the company blog and we know how tedious planning topics, organizing supporting resources and the ideation process can be. I was reflecting on how incredible a tool Evernote is yesterday and how helpful it is to me in the content marketing I do. I wanted to share how I use Evernote in my content marketing strategy.

1. Use Evernote to Capture Ideas: Evernote is the modern day equivalent of back of a napkin note-taking, planning, ideation. Evernote allows me to capture my ideas easily, quickly, and then store them in a categorized structure that makes sense to my mind. Evernote allows you quickly jot ideas down as they come to you throughout the way without breaking up your workflow. Evernote allows you to capture photos, images, lists, and more in your notes allowing you to organize your thoughts and memory however you see fit. This ease and convenience also comes with the knowledge that you will not throw your idea away with the trash. Where is that napkin I was doodling on at lunch?

2. Use Evernote for Research: Evernote is my favorite research tool for the web! The new Evernote Web Clipper is beautiful and allows me to annotate and curate the articles that inspire me, the research that is relevant to me, and the designs that wow me across the web. One of my favorite features is to click the simplified article button on the web clipper. This gets rid of everything except the core text of the article and makes it easier to annotate. Here is an example of a screenshot of a recent blog post by Brad Feld that provided some inspiration for me entitled, "Focus, Focus, Focus."

Once I clip and annotate the article as I come across it in my research, I can tag it with particular keywords, add it to a particular subject folder (for content marketing these are my content buckets), and share it across my social networks or via email.

3. Use Evernote for Collaboration: I love using Evernote Business as a knowledge repository for the organizations that I work with. Evernote Business allows you to centralize your team's knowledge repository, discover what your team knows, search through archives of knowledge, collaborate on team notebooks and presentations, and use the same productivity software I use in my personal life in my work environment with privacy controls! Evernote Business is particularly useful for content marketing teams because more often than not you will have designers who produce or find more visual content, while you will have your bloggers and how to guide producers who look for more textual content. Evernote allows you to capture both types of content and share it amongst your team in content buckets of common themes. This can increase team cohesion and help create a unified voice for your entire team.

Evernote is one of many tools that I use on a daily basis to make my life more productive. How do you use Evernote? What other productivity tools do you use? What tools help you with your content marketing strategy? Leave us a comment below!! If you need help with your content marketing strategy CONTACT US!